Language and Comparative Cognition

We are interested in the mechanisms that might be responsible for a linguistic capacity to emerge only in humans. We thus study whether humans share with other animals fundamental processes that are involved in the extraction of structure from the language input. We also study linguistic and perceptual constraints that shape such processes in humans at different developmental stages. To explore these issues, we perform a variety of experiments with both human adults and infants, using both behavioural and electrophysiological experimental techniques, as well as experiments with nonhuman animals.